![]() ![]() Titled ‘U.F.O.s and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time’, Douthat’s column identified a host of phenomena – from the recent balloon scare and putative sightings of extra-terrestrial life to the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – with ‘one of the patterns of our era, which is what you might call the incomplete reveal’. In mid-February, New York Times op-ed writer Ross Douthat broke the prevailing silence. In the week after it appeared, the New York Post was the sole US daily to treat Hersh’s story as a news item, while a representative squib on the Springer-owned website Business Insider ran under the headline ‘The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline is Proving a Gift to Putin’. Yet response to the piece, self-published as a Substack post on 8 February, was muted. Amidst such perplexity, a 5,000-word story by the legendary reporter Seymour Hersh, contending that the sabotage was a CIA operation executed on orders from the US president, might have been thought a bombshell. Bruits in December that the majority Russian-owned Nord Stream AG was soliciting estimates to repair the damaged pipes only added to the confusion. ![]() How, in one of the most closely surveilled waterways on earth, did the perpetrators manage to execute their attentats and escape without a trace? What might have been the motive? Initial statements from NATO politicians insinuated that Moscow was to blame, yet no evidence emerged to substantiate the charge, and the idea that Russia would destroy its own critical infrastructure – and potential source of leverage over Western Europe – vexed even trusting souls. ![]() This was, the New York Times had reported at the end of the year, a genuine ‘wartime mystery’. ![]() ‘Make no mistake’, declared the commander in chief, ‘if any object presents a threat to the safety and security of the American people, I will take it down’.ĭays after a F-22 Raptor Top Gun felled his first inflatable foe, news broke concerning another conundrum, the explosion of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in September 2022. The government has acknowledged that the other two likely had a ‘benign purpose’. The identity of the dirigibles remains unclear: the headmost, downed over the coast of South Carolina, was a weather blimp – authorities warned of Chinese spycraft – and one at least seems to have been a party-style ‘ pico-balloon’ loosed by hobbyists in Illinois. Four were shot out of the sky by Air Force pilots in the first weeks of February, at an estimated total cost of $8 million (the AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles used go for $400,000 a piece). Early in 2023, NORAD made known the existence of unidentified vessels flying over the continental US. Puzzlement is not confined to the garages and bank vaults of Delaware. He is currently under investigation for mishandling classified documents (conveniently disclosed after the November mid-terms) found at a Wilmington home let out to his crackhead son, himself the target of a separate DOJ enquiry (revealed to the public on the morrow of the 2020 election) into nebulous business dealings in China and Ukraine. Subsequent events have proved no friendlier to the octogenarian incumbent’s promise to ‘bring transparency and truth back to government’. Before long the First Family abandoned Major, their German Shepard, after FOIA requests by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch uncovered a spree of biting attacks and concomitant White House ‘cover up’. Within a month of his victory over Trump, the president-elect suffered an odd injury as he later clarified, he had broken his foot attempting to pull a dog’s tail while exiting the shower. Enigmas abound in Joseph Biden’s America. ![]()
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